Sunday, February 20, 2011

If you read this blog, you know that soon-to-be hot author John Hornor Jacobs is a friend of mine. You've probably even marveled that I have friends. John's novel Southern Gods won't be out until later in the year, but if you like hard-boiled crime stories, you can check out his "The Death Fantastique" over at Beat To A Pulp..

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

As some of you noticed, there has been a hiatus in the interviews I’ve conducted in the We Interrupt This Author series. This has been a result of a slight reorganization at Cemetery Dance (for more, see here). The series is now resuming, and Cemetery dance will be placing them on the Horror World website. I’m pretty stoked about this, as I’m a fan of Horror World. I look forward to taking orders from Nanci Kalanta.

The first of my interviews to go live(-ish) there is one I did with the great T.M. Wright back in the fall. Check it out by clicking here. T. M. Wright is one of those authors who, if you’re not reading his books, you should be..

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Bryan Smith is one of the better writers working in horror today. On this blog, I've reviewed his books House of Blood, Queen of Blood, Freakshow, Soultaker, and Deathbringer, and he's one of the few writers who has yet to let me down. He's now published his first book to be originally seen in e-book format, Deadworld. You can get it for the low price of $2.99 at Amazon, and I would recommend it. The cover is by my friend, the multi-talented John Hornor Jacobs..

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Despite not being much of a fan of the first one, I decided to give Hatchet II a whirl. Most people disagreed with me about the first Hatchet, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about the writer/director, Adam Green. I figured a key point of the review would be to compare and contrast the review I did of the first one, although it was much more etched in my memory than most movies I’ve seen. I still remember most of my criticisms, including a line I used “if you get Tony Todd to appear in your movie, you should have him in the movie as much as possible” criticizing the brevity of his appearance. So I could link back to it, I looked up the address of the original review.

It doesn’t exist.

I looked at the archives of this blog, and of the three previous blogs I filled with my illiterate ramblings (you’ve been at it too long when you’ve written for that many blogs). Nothing. Nada. Zilch. The only reference to Hatchet was in a throw-away line in my review of Laid to Rest. So what happened to this no doubt insightful and brilliantly written review of mine? Did it get accidentally eaten? Put on yet another site I’ve forgotten? Was it written by someone else and my damaged mind is convincing me it was my work? Did it never really exist in the first place?

Oh, and if those guys in the white coats are reading this, this jacket doesn’t fit well at all.

On to the movie…

The original Hatchet was billed as a return to “Old School American Horror”, chock full of horror icons like Kane Hodder, Robert Englund and the aforementioned Mr. Todd. It was a slasher film about a tour group in the Louisiana swamp that runs into a psycho named Victor Crowley and gets chopped to shreds. It had some humor, and a lot of in-jokes for the horror connoisseur (I remember mentioning that in my lost review, too! Dammit!) but I thought in the long run it was just another slasher film, and I’m not that big a fan of the sub-genre.

The sequel takes up where the first one left off, and I mean right where the first one left off. The original cast has been sliced and diced, except for one plucky female survivor, Marybeth (played by Tamara Feldman in the first one, and this time by Danielle Harris, who is becoming something of a horror icon herself). After escaping Victor Crowley, she decides she must…immediately return to the swamp, to get the bodies of her family members. Marybeth obviously didn’t get into MIT. She goes to Reverend Zombie (Todd) and he organizations a return expedition for his own purposes, which seem to be getting rid of Crowley so he can make millions off swamp tours in Crowley’s swamp. The reverend isn’t Mensa material either. He gets together a collection of the dumbest redneck stereotypes imaginable, and they go off to get killed by Crowley.

It’s exactly what you would expect it to be, so if you are looking for a standard issue slasher film, gory with a bit of humor thrown in, this is probably for you. It's the first movie done differently, with a little more backstory, in the tradition of horror sequels. Tony Todd is present throughout most of the movie, so apparently the filmmakers read the review I never wrote in some alternate universe, but that isn't enough to elevate it, as enjoyable as Todd's performance may be..

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

According the The Hollywood Reporter, CBS and Warner Brothers are teaming up to bring a new version of Stephen King’s classic novel The Stand to movie screens. George Romero tried to get the movie made back in the 1980s, and there was a fairly successful TV mini-series made in 1994. This is interesting news, and we will have to see how such a broad-scale novel translates into a movie format..